All kicking off on Facebook today as well - though they were a bit out of order by the looks of things and the parents need to provide some answers for their neighbours in my opinion. I wouldn't go on holiday if I were them

Hi, I have joined today and wanted to comment on this story as I actually live there and can probably let you know first hand what happened.

I don't know anything about the house party on Ware road nor whether there were 200 or 50 youths involved in that disturbance, however on Friday night I can say for sure that there were at least 20 or more youths congregating down at Dicker Mill shouting and screaming and throwing bottles. Their language was pretty bad, and at first I thought they were all friends however it got nasty and it transpired that there were actually two sides within the larger group who were threatening each other. There had been some fight earlier (which I did not witness, but I heard them talking about) where they discussed who had hit who, where, how hard, how much it hurt, and what they intended to do in return, and they were generally rowing with one another for hitting each other. It looked or sounded like a smaller proportion of them were being singled out and threatened, and there was a stand off between the two sides for a short time.

Some time later a fire was started on the bridge, not a huge one, but there is plenty of wood down there so it could have gotten nasty. I don't know what they set fire to but it burned until they kicked it over the edge into the river shortly before the fire brigade arrived. Once the fire brigade arrived the youths remained there and started to shout at the fire crew, swearing at them calling them the "W" word. Once the police arrived the youths dispersed fast, only to return 15/20 minutes later before eventually dispersing again later on. The incident lasted a couple of hours, it was loud, it was disturbing, the language was threatening and there was discussion that there had been some violence earlier that evening and may be more to come.

I cannot comment about Ware Road nor gang warfare generally, but the article I read about the incident at Dicker Mill was accurate, and a number of the local residents here witnessed it - we have since spoken about it and many of them were rightly frightened.